NVIDIA Releases VRWorks Audio and 360 Video SDKs at GTC

NVIDIA is making VR more immersive, and VR development easier, with the release of VR audio and 360-degree video stitching as part of our VRWorks software development kit.

Released at the GPU Technology Conference, kicking off today at the San Jose Convention Center, the VRWorks Audio SDK provides real-time ray tracing of audio in virtual environments, and is supported in Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. The VRWorks 360 Video SDK addresses the complex challenge of real-time video stitching.

VRWorks Audio for Physically Accurate Audio - Traditional VR audio provides an accurate 3D position of the audio source within a virtual environment. However, sound in the real world reflects more than just the location of the source -- it’s also a function of the dimensions and material properties of the physical environment.

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio helps create a truly immersive environment by modeling sound propagation phenomena, such as reflection, refraction and diffraction. And it does so in real time, thanks to the massive processing power of GPUs. Using NVIDIA OptiX ray-tracing technology, VRWorks Audio traces the path of sound in real time, delivering physically accurate audio that reflects the size, shape and material properties of the virtual environment.

cool stuff. Audio is a good thing to do well in general (kinda wish we'd get more 7.1 audio options though (other than just getting a full system). My creative 7.1, still working, is... old. lol.) and good positional audio and all that in VR will help make it better

More like Aureal, whose tech Creative buried. Have to wonder if this stuff won't prompt a lawsuit from them, even if it is generated organically from internal assets...

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The happy ending to the Aureal saga is that all those patents are now expired. 3D audio is mostly patent unencumbered at this point (a ton of patents were made in the 60s and 70s, like 'ambisonic' tech). Hell MP3 jsut lost its patent protection recently and Fraunhofer Institute stopped selling licenses for it.

This stuff sounds fun, but good luck with it being implemented into games unless NVIDIA is going to volunteer to do all of the implementation. We saw how far AMD's audio endeavor got, I'll be impressed if NV's fairs better.

This stuff sounds fun, but good luck with it being implemented into games unless NVIDIA is going to volunteer to do all of the implementation. We saw how far AMD's audio endeavor got, I'll be impressed if NV's fairs better.

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AMD's solution was hardware, and this is software, so while they are both audio 'solutions' being provided by GPU makers, they're not directly comparable. And given that Nvidia's software solution works with UE4, we might see broader adoption of it, especially if it is GPU agnostic in terms of performance (and it likely is).

AMD's solution was hardware, and this is software, so while they are both audio 'solutions' being provided by GPU makers, they're not directly comparable. And given that Nvidia's software solution works with UE4, we might see broader adoption of it, especially if it is GPU agnostic in terms of performance (and it likely is).

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If it's software it will bog the system down. That was the advantage of putting it in hardware.

Knowing nvidia, they will tap the GPU resources, and software emulate it for AMD to showcase how "Bad" AMD cards are. (Similar to the crap they pulled with PhysX)